CB asserts, and I agree (somewhat half heartedly) that the best thing for me to do is go out every day to get myself accustomed to the city and also just so that I don’t become housebound (you laugh but it has happened periodically in the past, though usually only for a week or so, and that was when I was in my hometown, let alone a strange town in a foreign country). I do agree, although it is far too easy to just do housework as a means to justify not leaving the place in this country where I’m the most comfortable and secure.

Anyway, I was supposed to go look for a fleece blanket for the bedroom ’cause there’s no central heating right now and it can get friggin COLD overnight. The room next to the bedroom is usually a decent temperature (21° C) as well as the kitchen down on the ground floor (that one is heated by a giant old Nestor Martin, the supposed Rolls Royce of gas heaters, so sayeth a friend of CB’s). The upstairs office heater and the tiny electric heater downstairs can be turned on by remote, so those rooms can preheat, which is nice. Well, if you refer to my Wordless Wednesday post, you can see that first it began to rain, and then it began to sleet. Suffice it to say I did not opt for a trip to the city centre today. I do consider my reason to be fairly legitimate though.

But that gives me more time to blog! Yaaaay! As if you haven’t suffered enough, here’s even more Korie time!

Here are some tidbits from the past few days that I jotted down but never had the time to flesh out:
-The day before New Years CB and I set out to gather the list of items we needed for our planned dinner. We took the bikes *cries* and set off for “the big GB” which is not the one that is close to the house. It’s not horribly far either, but for me every bike ride feels like a million miles. It’s all relative. Big GB wasn’t due to open for another hour so we went to Delhaize. I like the place. They have pads with wings, which we could not find in Colruyt and which I was convinced simply did not exist in Belgium before resigning myself to buying tampons. Well Delhaize has them and that, by default makes them my favorite grocery store in Belgium. It’s sort of the Belgian equivalent to Giant Eagle. Anyway, I digress. We got a lot of shopping done and set off towards home, but CB took a short cut through the mud. My dumb ass (despite the fact that CB was the one laden with bags if groceries, I had nothing but myself to worry about) kept losing its balance and I had to keep putting my foot down. Imagine a full (over) grown woman struggling just to stay on a bike. Yeah, it was sad. An old man actually laughed at me…I mean it, the guy was laughing his ass off. I refused to give him the satisfaction of looking over my shoulder (until I was up and on my way, then I looked back and he was definitely laughing at me).

-Remember all those Muzzy commercials you see on tv? The videos for kids that supposedly do wonders in teaching a second language? Last night one of those came on the television and the kids in it were speaking English!! How trippy is that?? Now I know how French people feel when they see the American version of the commercial.

-Here’s another one for you: dangling Santas. Yes, that is a popular Christmas decoration here. Santas on ropes that you hang from your roof or window so that it looks like
A. Santa is climbing up to your house to deliver goodies or
B. You have just lynched Santa and are hanging his corpse from your window for the whole neighborhood to see.
When I first saw these things, hanging from the roof of the local bowling alley at night, I went with option B. Now, after seeing them in the light of day as well as on sale in shop windows, I go with option B. Though I can admit that American Christmas decoration can be just as scary
in a “scorch your retinas” sort of way.

-And finally, here’s a conversation excerpt from earlier today in which I was trying to back out of going to the city by explaining my childish aversion to yucky weather (and also an example of how communication can sometimes go when you don’t share a native language with your significant cabana person)

3/01/2008		14:56:06		CB			you’re my grown up woman
3/01/2008		14:56:35		Korie			even if you tuck me in in the morning?
3/01/2008		14:56:40		Korie
3/01/2008		14:57:12		CB			I didn’t this morning
3/01/2008		14:57:53		Korie			yuh uh
3/01/2008		14:58:09		Korie			I felt you pull the cover up over me
3/01/2008		15:02:13		CB			oh misread that
3/01/2008		15:02:23		Korie			ROFL
3/01/2008		15:03:14		Korie			I so so so want to put that in my blog

And now that it’s still raining, I guess I’ll get around to some more of those chores.